Long Sweet Trip

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who first synthesized the chemical compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938, and discovered LSD’s remarkable psychotropic properties in 1943, died yesterday of a heart attack at the age of a hundred and two. Hofmann was a rigorous man with a romantic streak who was captivated by the mind-expanding properties of the drug. Word of its powers was slow to spread, and it didn’t really reach the rest of Western civilization en masse until some two decades later. But, boy, when the word got out, it really got out. The course of popular music was forever altered as the Warlocks became the Grateful Dead, the Beatles grew their hair out, and the West’s youth tripped their way into a thousand inferior psychedelic bands. Even disco owes something to the drug. The colorful flashing lights of every dance club have their roots in Ken Kesey’s famed California parties in the sixties, which were immortalized by Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” The following video gives a sense of what those heady, Acid Test days were like.—John Donohue